Scotch Irish Pioneers in Ulster and America

**Lallans** · 17th February 11, 10:31 AM

The author of this book was Charles Knowles Bolton. The library edition I have states it was originally published in 1910 and reprinted several times in the 1970s- it is at least old enough to use the now-frowned-upon term 'Scotch' when referring to Scottish people. An archived edition is available from Google at this web address:

http://books.google.ca/books?id=Lcia...page&q&f=false

'Pioneers' is mostly a work of geneology (my guess is that it was written for and sold to mostly Scots-Irish descendants), and in general provides lists of names of first US arrivals with very little commentary or 'colour' thrown in; there is also an unfortunate tendency on the author's part to assume that his readers (ie, of his day) would 'understand' what the Scots-Irish were then considered to be 'like', so most social references the author makes are merely allusions to those perceptions.

The book covers the very early days of Scots-Irish arrival in America in the late 1600 and early 1700s, but also there are sections on purely Ulster history as well. As is generally seen in these works, the Ulster sections mostly catalogue the lengthy list of misguided and destructive policies the Ulster Scots were subjected to after being planted there: Private ownership was limited to English investors. Rents were high and leases always went up for renewal after a period of nine years or so, meaning that any improvements to a property meant it would go to someone who could afford to pay more for it than the original tenant who had increased the value.
and, not least of all, the Anglican owners also tried to enforce a strict adherence to that church that were naturally not accepted by the Presbyterian settlers.

One of the social conventions alluded to above seems to have been that no matter where they went, the Scots-Irish tended to generate dislike from other groups. An anecdote from Ulster relates how a travelling visitor concidered the Scots rather dirty, so when approaching a farmhouse for meal asked for eggs which the farmwife placed to roast on the fire. As she was fishing them out, the traveller nervously asked if she thought they were well cooked enough... the woman proved they were by taking the needle she had been using to pick her teeth and piercing the egg shell with them.

Interesting observations about trans-Atlantic travel are made in this book that I haven't seen before, as applied to the Scots-Irish: one is that, since ships crossing the Atlantic via Ulster always started out in Scotland, it is impossible to tell whether or not those disembarking were actually Scots-Irish or rather 'pure' Scots. The other is how difficult trans-Atlantic travel actually was in those days- more than one emigration failed when the ship had to turn back after months of effort and on one ship, the passengers actually drew lots to see who would be eaten first... but then the ship got through.

Once arrivals did start in America, the book does an effective job of showing how the Scots-Irish started out in the ports and ended up distributed thoughout the few American colonies that existed at the time (as a rule always on the outer frontier of each). In Boston they encountered somewhat kindred religious spirits, led by Cotton Mather and the society developed by his father, Increase, who were eager to extend Christian charity and then get them out of Boston. In fact, a repeated theme is that large numbers of new arrivals at any one of the colonies, and the Ulster Scots of course always did arrive by the boatload, would be unable to provide their own food in the following winter and always placed a strain on the resources of the larger towns. The book follows the several settlements on the distant frontier (in those day, that would mean in an early example, 40 miles north of Boston), and then subsequent settlements of new arrivals on up into New Hampshire and Maine, again mostly relating settler's names and brief clerical anecdotes. There are also chapters on Pennsylvania, Virginia, and the Carolinas. As someone who knows in his heart that Davey was Scots-Irish, there is a mention of 'large numbers of Crocketts' arriving in South Carolina.

In both the northern and southern ends of the colonies, the Scots-Irish were set upon by the Indian allies of France and Spain respecively, establishing, to a present-day observer at least, the combative relationship the Scots-Irish would always have with natives as they pushed the American frontier west in later centuries.

The book concludes with a few observations about the cultural side of the Scots-Irish, mostly to say they had nothing in the way of arts or letters (for example there were apparently no known period letters or diaries from the actual emigrants themselves), and the author even laments how it would never occur to one of them [this is a paraphrase] 'that the severe corner of a cabin would be softened with a little planting of sumac....' But he does state what is obvious to 'most anyone who studies the era: without the Scots-Irish and their hard-earned fighting ways and hatred of the English, the other ethnic groups present in America, notably the Puritans and Germans, would never have risen up in actual rebellion and the United States of America would never have been founded.